Burnout ParadiseReview

Share.

Paradise City is open and waiting.

By Chris Roper

Criterion Games' Burnout franchise has now long been the king of arcade racing. Its tight controls and overwhelming sense of speed have catapulted it to the top of the genre, and few games have come even close to matching the series' strengths. But while Criterion has garnered tons of praise from both gamers and critics alike, the studio never sits still. With every release, the developer tweaks the core formula in an attempt to offer something new to gamers.

Burnout Paradise sees what are arguably the biggest changes in the franchise's history, with nearly every single aspect of the game having seen some sort of shift in design. Some of it works really well, and some of it not so well, but what we wind up with still remains an intense, blazingly fast and perfectly controlling racer, one that you shouldn't miss.

The biggest change introduced in Burnout Paradise is the move to an open world, the streets of Paradise City (cue Guns 'N' Roses title track). The entire city is open at the start of the game, with the idea being that you can do whatever you want, whenever you want. Not all of the events are present at the start, mind you, and you'll have to put in a lot of time to unlock the game's roughly 75 cars, but you're never limited in the options before you.

There are bits of good and bad to this. The good is that the city design is great, offering up plenty of varying spots for you to race in and tons of hidden areas to find. There is no shortage of tucked away passages, underground runs and all sorts of cool spots to hit. You'll find jumps littered everywhere, including small ramps with kickers on the side to send you into a barrel roll, which are great for the Stunt runs (which we'll come back to in a bit).

The main downtown area of Paradise City is very reminiscent of the downtown tracks in the last couple games, while the western section of the city harkens back to the long, winding, countryside courses of past games as well. A couple of highways will put you dead in the middle of traffic and give you plenty of road to get up to speed on.

The car designs are fantastic.

Paradise City is very dense, especially the eastern, downtown section, offering you a myriad of ways to get through a race. When a race starts, you simply must race from point A to point B as fast as you can, along whatever route you want. While this means that you're given the freedom to create your own course, it also means that you'll be stopping the action and referring to the map fairly often to make sure that you don't take any wrong turns. Since there are so many different tunnels, highways and such to take, it can be easy to make a wrong turn and wind up going off course for a bit. Until you've memorized the bulk of the map, which given its complexity, will take quite a long time, you'll likely have to pause and check the map two or three times during a race to make sure that you're on the right path.

There's an in-game indicator of where the finish line is, but it just points in the compass direction and doesn't help with turns or anything of that sort. This is understandable to a degree since Criterion (rightfully so) wants you to create your own routes and not rely on what it thinks you should do, but it does mean that you'll be at the mercy of the pause screen until memory starts taking over.